Collaboration, epistemic skill, and suspension

Abstract We cannot understand epistemic competence without embedding agents in the social world of epistemic collaboration. Being a competent epistemic agent essentially involves being competent at specific sorts of social interactions and negotiations. More specifically, suspending judgment is a skill, and it is a skill that can only be understood as embedded in our social practices of epistemic collaboration. We cannot understand the epistemic skills that enable apt suspension, or the role that suspension plays in epistemic agency or the promotion of epistemic goods, without careful attention to the social skills we need in order to effectively promote collaborative epistemic projects. These skills are both constitutively social and ineliminably epistemic. Although social practices of suspension are always shaped by practical values and interests, they are essential to our epistemic competence and not just our practical or ethical competence.